A study of Schubert’s song cycle explores the meaning of loneliness and finds a fitting climax

Schubert’s Winter Journey: 

Anatomy of an Obsession by Ian Bostridge

By Ivan Hewett

Winter Journey is the most famous romantic song cycle ever written, but it’s also deeply odd. In the first of the 24 songs, we learn that the singer has endured some terrible disaster. There are hints that it’s an unhappy love affair, but why does that mean he has to leave his home? “A stranger I came, a stranger I depart,” he sings. As if to numb his inner torment, he sets off on a long walk, through winter snow and ice.

On the way he sees strange things, fraught with meaning: a crow, two suns in a cold sky, a charcoal-burner’s hut where he takes refuge, a graveyard. In his imagination he encounters other things; the memory of the mail-coach's horn, possibly bringing a letter from his beloved, the memory of a happy springtime, the thought of her footsteps in the spring grass, now lying dead under the snow. The one thing that’s missing in these strange episodes is an encounter with another human being. Finally it comes in the last and most famous song of the set: “Der Leiermann”, the hurdy-gurdy man. He grinds out his pathetic little tune in a frozen street, with no one to listen – apart from the mysterious singer.

As Bostridge points out in his book, the shadowiness of this figure makes him fascinating. “We are drawn in by an obsessively confessional soul, apparently an emotional exhibitionist who won’t give us the facts; but this allows us to supply the facts of our own lives, and make him our mirror.” It’s an invitation we’ve seized, perhaps rather too eagerly. The journeyer’s loneliness is routinely seen nowadays as a metaphor for the impossibility of human communion, as if he’s a personage in a Beckett play transported back into Biedermeier Vienna. Or he’s seen as the archetype of the 20th-century exile, one among many sad-eyed refugees clutching battered suitcases, fleeing the threat of genocide. The piece has been arranged for orchestra and for hurdy-gurdy, turned into a ballet, staged several times, and made into a film by David Alden, in which Bostridge himself took part.


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